This is Halloween

I've had that song running through my head all week! And now finally today it is Halloween, and in fact as I type this, it's almost over. I'm starting this blog post at 5:28 pm, so I'll have to stop in a minute and get the kids ready to go out trick-or-treating.  

And now it's 10:30 pm and they're all tucked in for the night and the cats are fed and I can finally return to the blog. I think I'll go ahead and finish the post now -- it's not too late. I took a shower earlier today, so when I'm done I can just crawl into bed.

It was a mixed week -- got some things done, didn't get other things done. Having the book group here on Monday was lovely, and wonder of wonders, no one was scornful about my little Halloween dolls. Instead, they enjoyed them. "They're so cute!" They really are. They didn't remember ever seeing them before, which is possible. In 20+ years, the book group may just never have been to my house right before Halloween, until this year.

I got my flat tire fixed on Tuesday, and though I had to sit in the waiting room for two hours, at least it wasn't four hours, as they had predicted when I walked in without an appointment. There was a screw in the tire. They fixed it for free. I don't know why -- maybe that's some service I paid for when I bought the tires two years ago. I wonder how long they'll keep doing that? I probably have some paperwork in a pile somewhere that specifies.

I worked on my novel some, but not enough -- but it's OK. Now I have all November to work on it, even though the action of the story ends on November 1st. 

And then today, lovely Halloween. We carved our pumpkins (see photo above of the twins working on theirs and of course this lovely one of me). Teen B's pumpkin had a bleeding eye (we used food coloring), while Teen A's had square eyes and mouth (but he swore it had nothing to do with Roblox -- I am suspicious). I did a cat face in the little white pumpkin and a generic scary face in the big orange one. 

Rocket Boy celebrated Halloween in St. Louis. He got two pumpkins and carved them both (he texted us photos) and gave out granola bars to his surprised neighbors. It was fun texting photos back and forth with him. Maybe next year he'll be with us.

I realize that I am wearing a tank top and capri pants in the photo above, revealing my fat arms and calves (and also I am barefoot), but it was actually really cold here today. The high was supposed to be 43 or some such, but I'm not convinced it ever got out of the 30s. And so gloomy. Somehow very appropriate for the last day of October, the last lovely day.

In half an hour it will be November. The transition from October to November is always important for me. It makes me think of a poem by David Ignatow called "Rescue the Dead." I don't think I really understand the poem, but in it he contrasts loving and living, and I think of those as representing October and November. There's the line about how to live "is to set bread upon the table/and a knife discretely by." But also,

To love is to be led away
into a forest where the secret grave
is dug, singing, praising darkness
under the trees.

To love is October; to live is November. After tonight I must set aside the dark and the forest, and go back to setting bread upon the table (and a knife discretely by).

And in some ways I'm ready. I'll miss October, but November is always something of a relief, too. No more black and purple -- I try to wear more blue and brown. I don't really own a lot of brown clothes, so I substitute gray. Note to self: buy something brown to wear? I tell myself that most Novembers but I don't do anything about it. 

When I was 17 I had a beautiful brown dress with little gray and blue flowers on it. It was very flattering. I don't think I have a picture of it.

I had gotten costumes for the cats, but Sillers' witch cape didn't work out very well. It was too big and kept sliding down her body. Cats don't really have shoulders, as such, and so there's nothing to really hold a cape in place. I think the costume was actually for a small dog.

She didn't audibly object to the costume, didn't hiss or scratch when I put it on her. Just looked very sad and very confused, and hurried around the house with it sort of partly falling off. We took it off her pretty quickly.

There was a funny bit in Allie Brosh's second book about people who involve their pets in holiday celebrations and what the pets probably think about it. I can't really describe it -- you have to get the book from the library and see for yourself. Solutions and Other Problems is what it's called. Pretty funny, though perhaps not as good as her first book, Hyperbole and a Half. But still, not a bad second act.

Baby Kitty's costume was more successful: a candy corn collar, definitely intended for cats. He wore it for quite a while, didn't seem to mind it too much. But still, there was an indescribable expression on his face, something like, "There's something wrong here but I don't know what it is... I hope that soon it goes away... How much longer are we going to do this, exactly?"

Eventually he made an attempt to take it off, so I took it off and put it on Sillers instead, for a while. She liked it better than the witch cape, but still, she had that expression on her face. That hysterically funny but also very sad expression.

Last year, during Covid, neither twin went trick-or-treating, and the year before, only Teen B did. So it had been three years since Teen A went out on the 31st, but he did it this year. Here they are heading out (the photo was taken from across the street -- perish the thought of actually posing so Mom can take our picture). Teen B wore a long wig and his wizard costume, which he has had for ages -- maybe since 2016? I looked back at my old blog, but I don't mention their costumes every year. In 2019 I say we've really gotten our mileage out of that costume, and in 2015 he was Harry Potter (a different kind of wizard). So he probably got this wizard costume in 2016 or 2017. It gets shorter every year, but it still zips up, even over his hoodie. Teen A wasn't really anything in particular -- just wore black pants and hoodie, but he had a red bandana tied around his face and tucked into the hoodie and it actually looked kind of creepy. So it was fine, and nobody cares what you wear, anyway.

They went by themselves -- a first. In 2019 I went with Teen B (who was still Kid B at the time). This year there was no question that they would go alone. I stayed home with the cats and read a spooky novel -- The Uninvited by Dorothy Macardle. Every so often there would be a knock at the door and the cats would jump up in horror. They are not used to having all these visitors! There weren't that many kids out, though -- cold, Covid, plus it's Sunday. We sure have a lot of candy left. It's OK. I bought Tootsie pops and dum-dums, and those won't go bad. We can save them for next year!

Well, it's almost midnight, so I should finish this up and go to bed. It was a lovely night, a lovely month. And now it's over.

Still love this month

Well, it was sad to say goodbye to Rocket Boy again, and I admit to feeling some desolation around his leaving. But I got over it pretty quickly and now I'm happily enjoying October again. (I can't speak for the kids.) He'll be back in less than a month, because he has another dentist appointment on November 22nd and he'll probably come out the week before that, maybe as early as the 18th or so, which is only, like, three and a half weeks. 

Of course, he'll miss Halloween and Teen B's band concert. But you can't have everything.

It's awful, but I have to admit I don't mind him being gone in one way. He is so cold-blooded! And it's getting worse as he gets older. He's cold ALL the time, and insists on turning the heat up higher than the rest of us like it. We were thrilled to have him get the furnace working, change the filter and all that, but he set the temperature at 68 and that is just too warm. I like it at 65. Now, I should note that in the depths of winter, it's different. The house gets very cold around the edges, and 68 is a better choice. But in the fall, when it's in the 50s and 60s outside during the day, it doesn't need to be 68 in the house. And the nights! In cool weather, I like to wear a warm nightgown to bed, snuggle under warm covers -- and leave the window over our bed open and set the furnace temperature down low. Poor Rocket Boy. He likes to sleep in the buff, with the shade pulled down and the window closed and the temperature set to at least 68, if not higher. 

Again, this controversy improves in the winter. Even I don't like the window wide open if it's getting down around zero at night. So when he's here at Christmas, we'll probably be fine. But fall is a struggle. 

On the other hand, when he's sleeping next to me and I wake up in the middle of the night, I don't think, "what was that noise, is there someone in the house, is it a murderer, is it a raccoon, is it a ghost, am I going to die, what should I do," etc., etc. I just think, "Oh, Rocket Boy will deal with it," and I roll over and go back to sleep.

His presence is also important when it's October and I'm reading ghost books. As that familiar tingle creeps through me (while reading something enjoyably scary), I sometimes look up and notice an odd shadow in the hallway beyond the bedroom. And what was that noise? I screwed up -- at one point, I had planned to read super scary books during the week he was here, so that I wouldn't get too scared. But then I got the idea that I should save the super scary books for the last week of October, in the same way when I was younger I used to wear more and more black as the 31st approached. So now he's back in St. Louis and I'm left with my pile of scary books, and hmm. What to do, what to do.

I have been having a lot of fun with reading this month, I must admit. I've finished 14 books so far, with a whole week left to go. And none of them were serious books, with the possible exception of The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian by Sherman Alexie, which Teen A had to "read" for school (meaning, his class listened to a recording of it and then I re-read it to him and Teen B while they played computer games -- Teen B is now "reading" it for his Language Arts class), and, oh, maybe the book group book, The Midnight Library by Matt Haig, which I didn't enjoy, but it wasn't as bad as I'd expected. 

It got me thinking about regrets, what I regret doing, or not doing, in my life. For many years I regretted our move to Ridgecrest and quitting my good government job, though that's faded a lot. I don't care so much about the job anymore, and I'm glad we had all those crazy Ridgecrest experiences, but I do regret spending all my inheritance from my mother on maintaining our Ridgecrest lifestyle (renting a house there while not renting out our Boulder house, etc.). Oh well, money comes and money goes. 

But I have some other regrets that are oddly strong, considering the years that have gone by since. I intensely regret not having taken voice lessons when I was a teenager. I had a pretty voice, and I think with voice lessons I could have done more with it. What that "more" would have consisted of, I don't know. I realize that I could take voice lessons now, but at 61, it doesn't interest me. The instrument is fading. I do sometimes think about taking piano lessons again, but for the most part I am happy to be a music appreciator, not a performer.

Here's another goofy one that lingers: I regret moving into a single room in my student co-op in Berkeley during my senior year. My number came up (for a single room) a few days after the fall quarter started and I was already starting to become friends with a new roommate, Abby. I could have said no, I could have said, give the room to someone else. But I thought I wanted the privacy (I had a boyfriend, sigh), so I moved. It turned out to be such a lonely move and I got so depressed in that single room. The boyfriend and I were not getting along (unbeknownst to me, he was falling in love with someone else who'd just moved into the co-op). At the end of the quarter I got word that I had been approved to move into a room in a co-op apartment across town, and so I did that, too, which enabled me to break up with the boyfriend, about a year too late. But when I remember my last year of college one thing that comes to mind is Abby -- I think she could have been a good friend, someone I would still know now. Instead, I have no idea what happened to her. Abby Green, I think her name was, or Greene. See, I don't even remember that. 

I became good friends with someone in the co-op apartment, Laurie, but the friendship didn't last. She wanted to live in Israel, and just now I managed to find her online (she had a less common last name). Sure enough, she's in Israel, married with three children. I suppose we wouldn't have much in common. 

Anyway, regrets. They aren't worth much unless they help you to make better decisions later on. So what do my regrets tell me? Use your gifts, don't take friendship lightly, don't be a total moron about money. Those are good things to remember. Maybe I do.

We didn't do a lot while Rocket Boy was here -- for one thing, both kids were mildly sick and stayed home a lot. Rocket Boy arrived on Thursday, Teen B stayed home from school Thursday and Friday (covid test = negative), Monday was a holiday for the kids, Teen A stayed home from school Tuesday and Wednesday (covid test = negative), and Rocket Boy flew back to St. Louis Wednesday afternoon. We did go to the cabin on Sunday (I wrote about that last week), and we went to Munson's pumpkin patch in Boulder on Monday (see photo, which captures the twins mid-fight). We bought five pumpkins, the smallest of which was stolen off our front porch a few nights ago! What has happened to this neighborhood? Or perhaps it was a squirrel. We took some walks and did some cleaning and cooking and decorating. I had signed us up for online conferences with some of the kids' teachers Tuesday night and then totally forgot about them (sigh). I managed to reschedule one for Thursday, but RB missed it. Rocket Boy got to hear (and be thoroughly puzzled by) the last seven chapters of The Witches of Worm by Zilpha Keatley Snyder, a rather odd book that I had always meant to read. It was quite appropriate as an October bedtime book.

I brought out all my little Halloween dolls, which make me so happy, and as usual, ordered one new one from eBay. She arrived yesterday and she's up there with the rest (the witch in a blue and orange outfit, 3rd from the left, bottom row). There are 33 dolls in the photo: 24 Kelly Halloween Party dolls, 6 Chelsea Halloween dolls, 1 Chelsea not specifically Halloween but dressed as an avocado for some reason, and 2 Madame Alexander Halloween dolls. I still don't have a complete set of the Kelly Halloween Party dolls -- I have several years to go before it's complete, assuming I buy one new one each year. It occurred to me that the dolls will get rarer each year, so maybe I should buy all the rest of them now, whatever I can find, but I don't want to. I don't actually NEED to have a complete set. The collecting process is fun; I shouldn't hurry it.

My book group comes tomorrow and I still have a lot to do to get ready, but it will be fine. I didn't tell Rocket Boy they were coming until after he went back to St. Louis, so he cleaned without knowing why he was cleaning. I still need to vacuum and take another stab at the bathroom, but it doesn't look bad right now. I'm so pleased that they will be here at Halloween. I can't remember whether they have ever seen my little dolls. Of course, no one will like them as much as I do. I suspect no one in the book group except me played with dolls. I'm a bit of an anomaly that way. I find that a lot of women who grew up to do intellectual things had no use for dolls as children. Why is that, I wonder? I played with Barbies, paper dolls, my dollhouse, and what we called "big dolls." For several years, my life revolved around my dolls, and it was a great loss when I became an adolescent and somehow lost the ability to play with them. And then, of course, as an adult, I can't seem to stop adding dolls to my life. All those Barbies. My Playmobil dollhouse. I look at doll websites. I'm attracted to anything miniature.

I associate all that doll-playing with creativity. While I played with my dolls, I made up stories about them. I lived in my own world, but also the various worlds of the dolls. I've heard other women (who didn't play with dolls) talk about doll-playing as something "conventional" girls did; they were unconventional and didn't bother with stupid dolls. But I don't think there was anything conventional about the way my sister and I and our friends played with dolls. It's a puzzle (another type of plaything I adored as a child, and still do).

It may have more to do with whether there were boys in the family -- I think some girls don't play with dolls because they have older brothers who don't. Some people say they were more interested in playing out of doors, but I certainly did that too. And I read all the time, too. (How is it that I had so much time to do all these things?) It could be financial, too, but my mother grew up in a very poor home and still played with dolls obsessively -- paper dolls, in her case, which is what she could afford. My parents bought me lovely toys, and I'm sure that helped, but I don't think it's the only reason I liked dolls. My sister and I had bare bones dollhouses made by our Uncle Bob out of a Sunset Magazine pattern.

Speaking of dolls, and creativity, I spent several hours on my writing projects this week after Rocket Boy left and the twins went back to school. I guess that's only two days, Thursday and Friday, but they were enjoyable ones. I finally got past the block I was experiencing in Chapter 4 of my novel and moved on to Chapter 5. I hope I can get a few more chapters drafted this week, since we are coming up to the actual days of the story. It takes place over eight days, from October 25th to November 1st, and I wanted to be sure I got the weather right, so I kind of wanted to wait until those days were here. It's slightly ridiculous, since October weather in Boulder can be anything from hot to snowy. 

I also looked at some other writing. Toward the end of Rocket Boy's visit, I suddenly got the idea that I would like to put together a collection of short stories -- not to do anything with, you understand, just to have. I have written several stories over the years, and I thought it would be interesting to collect them, just in case I ever wanted to (self-)publish them, not that I ever will. So I started a new folder in my "Writing" folder, called "Story Collection," and I started going through all my old writing, looking for stories and copying them over to the new folder. At the moment there are eight, but there will be more. Some of them are more memoirs than stories, so it's possible they should be in a separate file. Or the "Story Collection" could have two parts, memoirs and stories. It's mine, so I can do what I want with it.

Using my talents. It's not my singing voice, but it's still my voice. And it's very satisfying.

So now we have one more glorious week of this wonderful month. The book group will come, the kids will go to school, and I hope I'll do a lot of writing and reading. I'll also have to do laundry (doing some right now, since it's Sunday) and dishes and other cleaning. I'll have to plan meals and grocery shop. We're supposed to have a bit of weather on Tuesday afternoon/evening, though probably nothing much. One of my tires looks low, so a visit to the tire store is in order, probably tomorrow. And then there will be all the other things that pop up out of nowhere. But it looks like a pretty nice week. Hope yours is too!

A nice visit

I'm starting this post rather late in the day, but we just got back from the cabin about half an hour ago. If I don't finish tonight, I'll finish tomorrow. 

Rocket Boy arrived Thursday as scheduled -- his flight was a little late, but that just gave me more time to put off cleaning the bathroom. At the very very last minute, RIGHT before going to the airport to get him, I spent 15 minutes working on the terrible bathroom floor and toilet. So ridiculous -- I don't know why I couldn't have done it sooner. But whatever. 

When he walked in the front door, the house looked much better than it did a few weeks ago, so I decided I didn't mind that he immediately started making cleaning plans. He's worked on our bedroom and the living room so far, and interestingly, those are both rooms that I worked on before he got here. I think I cleaned enough for him to be able to spot more things to clean. Or something like that. Anyway, the book group is coming here next Monday (I haven't told him that, don't want him to panic), so it's great that he's cleaning.

The kids and I were slightly sick for a few days before he came, and on Thursday I kept Teen B home and he and I both got covid tests. But they were both negative, so I guess we're fine. Just some tiny little bug. I have a nagging cough, and I sneeze now and then, but that could be allergies. Teen A has been coughing for several days, but insists he is fine, refused to stay home from school. And Teen B actually had a brief sore throat, plus a little coughing, but he seems fine now. Whatever.

The visit is going fast. Friday, RB worked for several hours, but also found time to repair some things (e.g., two lights in the kitchen). Saturday he got a haircut and took the kids swimming, while I had a Zoom call with old friends. And today we went to the cabin -- we hadn't been up there since July, of course, since that was the last time he was here. That was the time we continued on to Salida, when the sky was hazy and ugly from smoke.

We had completely missed the fall color -- all the aspen were in the gray ghost stage. But it was a beautiful day, gorgeous blue skies. I love South Park in the fall. It has a certain glow. I never have pictures of that, because I'm always driving when we come over Kenosha Pass and down the swooping road into the Park. You'll just have to take my word for it. It's magnificent.

They'd had a few snows the last couple of weeks, and there were patches of it still in shady areas, even though it felt very warm -- in the 50s and with bright sunshine. But what was most noticeable was that the beaver ponds were mostly frozen, just a few patches of open water and I did see one small area where the water was moving, over on our neighbor's property. Winter is coming, quickly. I didn't see any beavers.

As always, I couldn't breathe up there -- maybe it was even a little worse than usual, despite losing some weight and getting regular exercise. It might have been that tiny bit of congestion I have right now. I don't know. All I know is that it was very difficult to walk back up the hill from the ponds, and I was sleepy the whole time we were there, from lack of oxygen.

The kids were very bad -- even though they'd said they wanted to go, earlier, they complained the whole way there and all the time we were there. Teen A helped Rocket Boy with a small project (more shelves), did some drilling and such. Teen B just played on his devices, though later he took a walk with RB down to the ponds. 

I don't know exactly what we've done wrong with these boys, but we sure haven't gotten them to love the cabin. They used to enjoy playing with RB's old toys that we keep up there, but they've grown too old for toys (that was fast). Maybe if we'd spent more extended time up there, instead of driving back and forth the same day, always, that would have helped. If we'd gone up for weekends, spent a couple of days hiking around... That's my fault, because I can't breathe -- I'm miserable when we try to spend the night. And we've never gotten them into hiking and camping at all, even though we started to in Ridgecrest. When we moved back to Colorado, we only camped a few times with the twins club, never on our own. I don't really know why. Things just didn't go right after we moved back.

When we die, the kids will sell the cabin the next day. Unless Rocket Boy predeceases me, in which case I'll sell it the next day. I know he thinks about that. I wish we could find someone who loves it -- then he could leave it to them. I'd go along with that idea. But I don't know anyone who would love it. 

Now we just have a couple more days together. Tomorrow the kids have the day off from school, sort of a replacement for Indigenous Peoples Day last Monday, which wasn't a holiday for them. I finally get to see the endocrinologist, I need to go to the grocery store and the library, I need to finish the kids' laundry and call the orthodontist, and other than that, I don't know what we'll do. I want to decorate for Halloween, but no one else has shown much interest. RB could work; he could do more cleaning; I'm sure there are more things to fix. Tuesday the kids go back to school and RB has the dentist appointment he came out here for. 

And then he flies back Wednesday afternoon.

On Saturday, when he and the boys were trying to decide what to do, he suggested going to the Denver Museum of Nature & Science, but their new exhibit (which will include sloths) doesn't open until next week, so Teen A suggested they go next weekend instead. "But Dad won't be here then," I pointed out. 

"What?! He's leaving so soon?" It hurt to see how sad that made them. Big teenage boys that they are, they still really miss their dad. I explained that he'll be back for Thanksgiving. "My band concert?" Teen B said hopefully. "I don't think so," I admitted. The band concert is November 9th. I wish RB would come for that, but I don't think he's going to. 

I've been reading up a storm, four more books this week. The best was The October Man by Ben Aaronovitch, a delightful supernatural mystery set in Germany! I loved it. I went online to see if there were sequels, but his other books are set in England. I read one a couple of years ago and didn't like it so much, but this book was really fun. Maybe he'll write a sequel someday. These characters seem too good not to continue with.

Somehow I jumped from #51 to #1 this week on the list for The Midnight Library, so I'm just waiting for it to arrive at the main library (it's listed as "in transit") and then I can read it. Plenty of time before next week's book group meeting. Just have to fit it in among everything else. I still have piles and piles of things to read, and of course November is looming. As soon as we cross over into November I have to set aside the fun stuff and go back to serious books about Indians and Presidents.

So, a couple more days to enjoy being with Rocket Boy, a couple more weeks to enjoy October, a few more years to enjoy my teenagers before they move on with their lives.

Another October week

Moving along into October, it's been a productive week. Last week I set up a nice cleaning schedule for myself and of course -- didn't follow it. But I partly followed it, and that's good enough for me. I didn't do everything on the right days, but that's OK too. I partially cleaned the bathroom on Wednesday, which means I only have to partially clean it this week to get it in pretty good shape. I didn't vacuum on Friday! but I'll vacuum this week, closer to Rocket Boy's arrival, and that will be fine. I didn't dust, but I did work on clutter. Etc. I also spent many more hours than planned on the files, because once I got past one impossible file drawer (full of newspaper clippings from the 1980s), it got easier and I could really make progress. I hope to spend several more hours on the files this week, so that I can demonstrate to Rocket Boy that I am starting to gain control over them (which I do feel is happening) (though there's a long way to go).  

I should make a plan for the next four days, just so I don't forget to do something I really want to do before he gets home. The goal is to have him walk in the door and say, "The house looks nice!" instead of "Oh, God, I guess I'll have to spend time cleaning." I have enough on his to-do list already, don't want to have to add whatever cleaning tasks he decides are necessary.

I also devoted myself extensively to reading this week, and finished three of the four spooky books I'd gotten from the library. The fourth turned out to be very dumb, so I took it back unfinished. But I know a lot more about witches and Halloween in general than I did before. I keep checking the calendar to be sure I have time to read what I want to, which is kind of silly. It's hard to enjoy a book if you're always counting pages and looking at the clock. Whatever doesn't get read this month can get read another month.

I am moving up the library's hold list for the Book Group book (The Midnight Library) -- now #51 (last week I was #85). If I can just get to the top of the list by October 24th I'll be OK (the book group meets October 25th). Amazon says it's 304 pages, but I've read multiple reviews that say it's a quick read, so there must be a lot of white space, not too much text on the pages. Oh, and the chapters are supposedly short and numerous, so that would add in a lot of blank pages, or at least white space. I'll probably have to decide on food before I see the book, which could be a problem since we always try to tie the food to the book. But the Internet can be helpful here. Aha! The main character is a vegan. Broccoli pasta is what one site recommends, black bean tacos, lentil dal, Brazilian honey cakes (could make those). And peppermint tea -- that one's easy. Well, I think I'll just scope out vegan restaurants, of which there are some in Boulder. Hopefully one is open on Mondays -- it's quite a problem that we meet on a day when so many restaurants are closed. It was easier when we didn't serve dinner, but now that we meet at 5:30, dinner is a requirement. Ah, well, everything changes.

Speaking of cooking, I did pretty well this week. On Monday I made pasta with a salad -- just dumped a jar of tomato sauce on top of spaghetti, but I thought it was OK. The twins didn't like it, though, because it was "Creamy Rosé Tomato & Cream Sauce." I don't like standard tomato pasta sauce, too harsh, so I always buy varieties with cream or cheese, but then the kids think it tastes weird. OK, so maybe that wasn't such a good day. Tuesday, they insisted we get takeout, because we hadn't eaten out on the weekend. So we ordered from Oregano's, a restaurant near us that has never fully reopened -- you can get takeout but you can't eat there. Big mistake. The food was dreadful, so greasy, and just bad. Sorry, Oregano's, in our opinion you might as well give up and close completely. Wednesday, I ate some of the leftovers for lunch and made myself sick, so I told the kids to make ramen for themselves and I would just lie on my bed and moan. 

OK, none of this is sounding good AT ALL, but Thursday I redeemed myself. I made "Skillet Curried Vegetables and Couscous" from one of Jeanne Lemlin's cookbooks and the twins actually liked it, despite the curry flavors. We had leftovers on Friday, and to go with them I made "Cheese Scones" from another of Lemlin's cookbooks. Despite the clash of flavor profiles, they were good and everyone was happy. Saturday we got boring takeout from Snarf's, and tonight I am planning to make "Stir-Fried Broccoli and Tofu in Peanut Sauce," also a Lemlin recipe.

Oh, and I also made cookies -- was that Tuesday? They were gone very quickly.

No idea what I'll cook this coming week. I'll think about that tomorrow. If I can stretch tonight's dinner for two meals, then I'll need something for Tuesday/Wednesday and Thursday/Friday (Rocket Boy will be home for that one). Saturday we can eat out (the twins have already decided on Chinese food) and Sunday we might go to the cabin, so we'll have something along the way. OK, so I'll have to think of two meals. Like I said, tomorrow is time enough for that.

I'm not feeling very creative or inspired this afternoon, probably because I didn't get enough sleep last night. I usually talk to Rocket Boy every night -- we miss a night or two here and there, but not many -- and last night I realized that I hadn't spoken to him for the previous two nights. So I called, but there was no answer and he didn't call me back. That made it THREE nights in a row, which is very unusual, and so I started to worry.

When I worry about Rocket Boy not calling, I move very quickly to assuming he's dead. This sort of catastrophizing is pretty much the way my mind always works, but with him I think I'm always a little worried in the back of my mind because he's 878 miles away. This balloons into serious, tragic worrying with only the tiniest provocation. Three nights of not calling, I thought. The cellulitis must have recurred and now he's lying in bed in his apartment, dead for two days. 

Once I've decided he's dead, I move quickly to what I'm going to do about it. Do I cry, do I grieve? No (because in the back of my mind I don't really think he's dead). Instead, I start thinking about how I'm going to get to St. Louis to deal with the body and clean out his apartment. I will have to bring the twins because there is no one to leave them with, but I don't want them to miss school. I will need a functioning phone (I still haven't set up my new phone). I will have to write an obituary. Should we have a memorial service? On and on, all the details. Last night I worked them out in my mind while playing endless computer solitaire (this is after putting the twins to bed and feeding the cats, so it's getting later and later -- normally I turn my computer off before I put the twins to bed, to avoid this sort of bad behavior). 

Finally, I went to the kitchen to get a snack and noticed my phone on the counter, blinking. I looked at it -- Rocket Boy had sent a text a few hours earlier showing a museum he went to this weekend. He was alive.

So then I felt ridiculous, but I still couldn't calm down and go to bed because I had to come down from the stress of thinking about his death. I finally got myself off the computer and into bed, but then I had to read for a while. I finally turned off my light around 2 am. And got up at 8:30 am, so yeah, I'm a little tired. I'm making a list in my mind of what I have to do before I can go to bed again:

• Make dinner
• Take a walk
• Serve dinner
  
• Talk to Rocket Boy...
• Clean the kitchen
  
• Put the twins to bed
• Feed the cats
• Take a shower
• Read for a little while
  
• Ahhhhhh -- bedtime!
  

I'll get there, but oh how I wish I could skip the first eight items on the list, crawl into bed with a book, read for a few minutes, and pass out.

Here is a photo of some loving kitties, who in fact at this moment are curled up together on my bed, along with Teen B. I would like to be on the bed too, but there is no room. Maybe instead I'll go mix up the sauce for the broccoli and tofu. The joys of motherhood are without number (a joke I never get tired of). 

So, a busy week ahead: lots more cleaning and going through files, a meeting on Tuesday, a blood test on Wednesday (and at some point I really should get a flu shot), and on Thursday afternoon, if all goes well, Rocket Boy!

Welcome, October

I am so happy it's October! I didn't realize how much I was looking forward to the month until it was almost here. It has always been my favorite month, I always enjoy it, but this year I guess I just really needed a lift, and here comes October to provide it. Lovely cool weather, beautiful fall color popping up all around the neighborhood, and a ready-made theme to plan the month around. 

I love themes. Maybe it is because I am not naturally creative that I like to have a framework to organize my life. Or maybe, thinking more positively, it is just that my creativity flows better within a frame. Whichever it is, themes make me happy. It occurred to me that the lack of themes in March through September may encourage me to be more depressed during that time. Also the weather.

Here is the year as I see it:

• October: Halloween month, appropriate for reading spooky books, wearing spider earrings with a lot of black clothes, and filling the house and yard with pumpkins, real and decorative.
  
• November: Thanksgiving and Election month, lends itself to patriotic activities like reading Presidential biographies, voting, and making apple pie.
• December: Christmas month, 'nuff said.
• January: Cold month, appropriate for making soup and baking, sleeping under piles of blankets, and going for walks in bleak, snowy landscapes.
• February: Valentine's month, appropriate for eating fancy chocolate, reading Barbara Pym books and love stories, and wearing pink and red and purple...
  
• March: not really spring, not fully winter, basically very depressing month during which time I also have to put on the twins' birthday parties and plan/execute Spring Break.
• April: usually Easter, but complicated by the fact that Easter moves around, it could easily snow, and I hate all the mess of hardboiling and then dying eggs, oh, and HIDING eggs. Partially redeemed by the large number of jellybeans available for general consumption.
  
• May: End of school, which has both happy and sad aspects, beginning of summer, weather still unsettled, kind of emotionally stressful...
• June: Officially summer, though it could be hot, could be cold. Enhanced by trips to the nursery, planting the green things obtained there, and watching them grow.
  
• July: My birthday month plus 4th of July, I should enjoy it, but basically this month is just HOT. Try to have a good time, but mostly sweat.
• August: Still really hot, dry, everything looks dusty and worn out, school starts but it always seems too early...
• September: Traditional start to school but of course we've been going for ages already, still hot, waiting for the heat to break, waiting for time to pass...
• October again!
  

If I could come up with a positive theme for months like April, May, and August, maybe I would enjoy them more.

Anyway, it's October and my depression has lifted a little. There's still this underlying sadness, but every time I feel sad, I think about the fact that it's October, and that helps. I have started reading a book about witches, and even though it is not the best book I've ever read, the subject matter feels entirely appropriate. Plus, I have this huge stack of other spooky books waiting for me to read them. I've decided I don't want to buy the book group book this month (we're reading The Midnight Library by Matt Haig and it doesn't sound good at all) so I put a hold on it at the library and I am #85 out of 95! Even though the library owns 84 copies, I don't think I'll have to read that thing for a LONG time. My hope is that it will become available about two days before the book group meets (on October 25th, here).

Also, today I took the kids to Starbucks for a treat and I had a Pumpkin Spice Latte. Everything seems better in the context of a Pumpkin Spice Latte.

We celebrated Sillers' 4th birthday this week, as planned. I think she likes the new Etsy cover for her dog bed a lot. It's so soft and so pink. She actually prefers to sleep on my bed or on the loveseat in the kids' room (because it gets a lot of morning sun), but in the evening she can often be found on the dog bed.

I was going to make her a cake, even bought new cake flour at the grocery store (and threw out the old cake flour which had an expiration date of 2014 on it -- scary!), but I also had to make a pot of soup that day, and by the time the soup was made, I didn't feel like making a cake. 

So I buzzed off to Safeway and found a lovely fall-decorated (white) cake and we had that. I gave Sillers a tiny piece, and she and Merlin inspected it, maybe even licked it, I'm not sure, but they didn't eat it. Cats do not like cake.

I admit I did look up recipes for cat birthday cakes on the internet, but they all contained tuna and I didn't want a tuna cake in the house. Besides, the cats do not need to gain any weight. So a real cake was better, not that the human inhabitants need to gain any weight either. Actually, Teen B is holding steady at five feet tall and 90 pounds, so he probably does need to gain some weight (so he can grow). And Teen A is a little taller every time I measure him, so he can handle the calories too. I, on the other hand, have indeed started to gain my weight back, just as I had feared. Compared to early January, I am down 15 pounds, but a few weeks ago I was down 18 pounds. Not being nauseated anymore is taking its toll. I mean, it's great not to be nauseated, don't get me wrong. But it means I have to think about my weight again, about what I'm eating. Who wants to do that?

One exciting thing that happened this week was that I vacuumed. With the newly repaired vacuum cleaner. And oh, what an amazing experience that was. It was like watching a commercial for vacuum cleaners. I turned on the vacuum, ran it over one of the little rugs we have by the front door, and the dirt disappeared -- like magic! I tried it on another little rug -- same thing happened. It was a miracle! I went all over the house, vacuuming up dirt. I was near tears. 

You have to understand that vacuuming had become a huge chore for us, because it took so long to vacuum anything. We'd have to go back and forth, over and over and over the same spot, until the rug MAYBE looked a little better. And then move on to the next rug. It took forever, with very poor results. And this bad vacuum cleaner behavior developed so gradually, over so many years (the vacuum is at least 20 years old, because it predates my living in this house), that I didn't realize it needed fixing.

So now I'm wondering -- how often should I vacuum? Because now it's so easy, I can do it quite often, but how often is normal? How often do most people vacuum?

I decided that once a week would be a good frequency, and I also decided that I should have a vacuuming day each week. And then I started to wonder whether it would be good to have a cleaning chore assigned to each day. I already do the twins' laundry on Sunday -- that probably seems sacrilegious to some people, but I find that it is a very good day to do laundry because it means the twins are set with clean clothes for the week. I have to do two loads, but that's OK, I can handle it. The twins wear eight pieces of clothing most days, for a total of 112 pieces a week, except that Teen B actually wears six pieces of clothing three of those days, so it's actually 106 pieces total, plus I throw in Teen B's cloth mask and both of their sweatshirts, which divides almost perfectly into two large loads of laundry. (If you're wondering, they each wear 1 shirt, 1 pair of shorts, 1 pair of undies, 2 socks, 1 pair of 2-piece pajamas, and 1 pair of nighttime undies (a habit which we can't get them to break; we also can't convince them that shorts could be worn more than once before washing, ditto pajamas) every day.) Three days a week (unless it is snowing), Teen B wears flip flops instead of shoes, so he doesn't need socks, but the other four days he has PE, so he has to wear shoes and socks.

So, what should I do the other days? After some thought, I came up with this schedule:

• Monday: pick up clutter that has accumulated around the house
  
• Tuesday: dusting (we have some serious cobwebs)
  
• Wednesday: bathroom (some aspect of it)
  
• Thursday: trash, recycling, compost (in preparation for pickup on Friday)
• Friday: vacuuming
• Saturday: free day
  
• Sunday: laundry
  

There are other things that could be on the list, but they are harder to schedule. Grocery shopping, for instance. I often go on Tuesday, but sometimes it's Monday, sometimes it's Wednesday, and sometimes I have to go again on Thursday or Friday. Hard to put in a schedule. And some things need to happen every day or every other day: cleaning the kitchen, cleaning the litter boxes.

I am going to try this for the month of October and see if I can follow it. The idea is that I would spend no more than half an hour on each task each day. I realize that normal people clean their bathroom(s) every week, but since I happily go months without cleaning ours, it would be a big deal to clean one aspect of it each week.

Another plan I made for October is to work on the files for half an hour each weekday. I started working on the files several weeks ago and then just stopped, basically horrified by the task. So I decided that if I worked on it 30 minutes a day, 5 days a week, I would make some progress. I started on Friday -- it was painful, but after 30 minutes the timer rang, and I got to stop. It was OK. So I'm going to try that again this week.

All these cleaning plans are related to the fact that Rocket Boy is planning his next visit -- though I'm not sure just when it will be. I want him to come for three weeks in November, but he thought he should also come in October, since he hasn't been here since July. He needs to have a crown replaced, so he might as well connect these visits to us with dental appointments. So he called our dentist on Friday, left a message, and we'll find out this coming week when the dentist can see him and arrange a plane flight or two accordingly. 

The cleaning plans are also related to my attempts at Time Management, based on the two books I read a couple of weeks ago. I have continued making a Done list each day, much more helpful than a To-Do list, but I find that it's also helpful to write three or four things that I want to get done that day on the side of the list, so I don't forget them. These aren't aspirational things, they're things that really need to get done that day, like grocery shopping or picking up Teen A at school for his orthodontist appointment. I am also continuing to refer to my Master To-Do list, both to cross things off and to add to it.

So maybe it's all of that that's making me feel better -- feeling a little more in control of everything and not so overwhelmed. Or maybe it's because it's October. Or maybe it's just the internal cycle that my moods follow, up and down, up and down. It makes me wonder yet again if I might in fact be bipolar (I think the preferred terminology these days is "have bipolar illness"), like my mother and other members of the family. It would certainly not be surprising, though no therapist that I have ever seen has thought I did. If I do have bipolar, it would presumably be bipolar II, or even cyclothymia, since I have never had a manic episode of the sort my mother used to have. I also don't usually have truly deep depressions. I can always function, even if I'm feeling down.

When my mother got manic, she used to plan all sorts of things -- parties, projects -- that she was unable to complete when she fell back into the depressed state. Is making cleaning plans equivalent to that? I often make such plans and then fail to follow through. I think that has more to do with the fact that I don't like to clean than mental illness, but I don't know. I know that as a general rule I hesitate to make big plans that I won't be able to carry out later, because I know the depression is always going to come around again -- but if I were actually manic or hypomanic I probably wouldn't hesitate. Right?

I do know I don't want to go see a psychiatrist and start taking some sort of awful bipolar medication. I'd rather have my highs and lows. If I had the kind of highs and lows my mother did, it would be different. 

This week I happened to read an article in the New York Times about Seasonal Affective Disorder and I was startled by how much its early signs resembled how I was feeling.

It tends to start with so-called “vegetative symptoms”: an increased appetite and a craving for carbohydrates like french fries or ice cream, the urge to sleep longer hours, difficulty getting up in the morning and feeling wiped out at work.

Then, in three to four weeks, “the mood plummets,” said Michael Terman...

Vegetative symptoms. Do vegetables crave carbs and sleep a lot? And is it possible to show both vegetative and hypomanic symptoms? Wouldn't the two cancel each other out? I'm so confused.

Well, I've run out of this week's photos of fall color (and hawks, and stormy skies, and pumpkins, and loaded apple trees), so that must mean the blog post should come to an end. I'll just say again, I'm so pleased that it's October. I have fun tasks ahead: decorating the house (which for me mainly means getting out all my little Barbie dolls in Halloween costumes), sending a few Halloween cards (not nearly as many as I used to send, but a few -- I bought them already, they're just sitting here waiting to be sent), and reading all those lovely books. And Rocket Boy's visit -- I hope! I've really missed him. Even though I'll have to do some extra cleaning beforehand, I'd really like to see him. Hope it's soon.